Keyword Research 101

Analyse and target the right keywords for your website in 2 easy to follow steps.

1. Brain storm keywords

If you are selling a niche product or service then your job is easy. You just list all variations of keywords for your niche topic and try to think of related words.

Here is what I would recommend:

Name all key terms that are most relevant to your business proposition. I recommend opening an excel spreadsheet and listing the keywords there.

NOTE: Think like your customer and use their language, not yours!

Ask yourself this: what do I think my customers would search for when they look for my products/services?

Useful tip: You can always draw ideas from your competitors. Have a look at a couple of competitors who rank well for key terms that you are targeting. If they rank well then they must have done a decent job optimising their pages for the keywords in question. You can view the title and heading of the page and see what keywords or key phrases they are using. Also do a view page source in your browser and look for the meta tags Keywords and Description. You can see all the variation of keywords they are optimising the page for.

Interesting statistics (based on research by OneStat.com)

Of all searches on search engines

20% are for single words (only!)
33% are for two-word combination
26% are for three-word combination
21% are for four or more words

So as you can see 2 or 3 word combinations are the best to go for and if you can be specific enough to use 4 or more then those will be quite easy to rank high for these keywords that relate to your company.

This being an introduction to keyword research I won’t go into details of more advanced topics such as how to look for and analyse related, qualifying and semantically equivalent phrases. I will be blogging on those topics soon, so do follow my updates on RSS, twitter or email subscription.

2. Analyse keyword effectiveness

So now you should have a spreadsheet with a list of key phrases. How do you prioritise and identify which ones to go for as your primary keyword?

To ensure that you have a good chance in getting a high ranking in Google and other search engines its beneficial to spend some time finding out which of these key phrases will give you the best chance in ranking high?

Note: you can only effectively optimise a page for one primary key phrase (2 or more keyword combination) and one secondary one. The key to success here is focus.

We need to strike a balance between how much search demand there is for a keyword combination and how much competition.  The way we can do that is by looking at two different variables:

Keyword Demand

Say for example you are selling business cards. After doing some research and brain storming you have come up with the following phrases that relate to your speciality:

Business cards
Business card design
Business card printing
Quality business cards
Corporate business card

There are various tools you can use to see how many searches are done for the above phrases on daily basis. www.wordpot.com, freekeywords.wordtracker.com, and Google keyword tool are a few popular ones. I like to use the Google keyword tool. In the UK something like 80% of all searches are done by Google, the Google keyword tool shows you reliable local and global figures.

So if I type each of the above in the Google Keyword Tool I get these global search results figures:

The above figures are the number of times people searched for a phrase in Google. This is also referred to as search volume or search traffic.

Keyword Competition

Put simply this is the number of pages on the Internet that contain your chosen phrase, for example “business cards”.

If you do a search for “business cards” in Google.com this is the result you get

93,800,000 is the number of pages on the net that contain the phrase “business cards”. That’s right, a huge number and as such not very easy to get a high ranking for if you are not a major player in this field with a website that has been on the Internet for years. Also worth mentioning is that the accuracy of these large numbers are very questionable. In this example, if you keep clicking the next page in the search results, the maximum number of pages that Google let’s you see is 87.  So where the 98 million comes from is a bit questionable, but in any case a good indication to the level of competition.

Now if you’re trying to get the competition figures for a long list of keywords it might take a long time. That is why I have created a tool to automate this process for you. Check our Keyword Competition Tool here.  With this tool not only can we retrieve the raw competition (as above) but also we look at direct competition which is the result of allinanchor:Search Term. This shows the number of pages with an inbound link that has anchor text matching the phrase. In my example below I am going to use the direct competition figures because I think this returns more accurate results.

So after inputting the phrases into our Keyword Competition Tool this is what we get back:

Some keyword analysis tools use a figure called KEI which is calculated as SearchVolume ^2 / RowCompetition. In my example above I am going to use KOI which is calculated as SearchVolume ^2 / DirectlyCompeting. In my experience this returns a more accurate indication.

How to analyse the above table? The higher the KOI the better change for you to rank higher for that phrase. This is because higher KOI means a higher search volume demand and lower competition in comparison to the other phrases.

Surprisingly the broader phrase “business cards” has the highest KOI and this is purely because it has the much bigger search volume. Hence use these figures as part of a balanced mixed of factors. Other factors to look for are to analyse other websites that appear on the first page of Google for each of these keywords.

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Tagged as: content, copy writing, Keyword Optimization, keywords, SEO

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